sudden sounds, nor fear to be left alone in my library when it grows late. I play with my clean-born children. Evie is happy with me. And I even have Miss Angela in a cleft stick--for, when things go well, she is my gentle and much-loved maiden aunt by marriage, but when they go across she is my mother-in-law, who would stare incredulously at any who might hint that my brain could plot a horror and my two hands execute it. And yet I write this, and sometimes waste an hour in wondering why, all of a sudden, Kitty Windus threw me over without giving a reason, and, when I went for one, had left her rooms in Percy Street and gone goodness knows where. But bah! They are wrong who say that for every crime somebody has to pay. They speak from hearsay. I do not speak from hearsay. To my own knowledge one crime has been committed for which nobody has paid and nobody ever will. Well, things are as they are ... and so I will make an end. My desperate struggles to save Archie Merridew included an interview that I had positively to force from Miss Angela. I had to force it for the reason that, though I was now theoretically exculpated from the charge under which I had lain, slander always sticks, and some of it still stuck with Miss Soames in spite of her efforts to forget it. That, I think, was the reason why she saw me in the dining-room at Woburn Place instead of in her own sitting-room, where, I knew, Evie was. There, among the empty chairs, toying with Mr. Shoto's napkin-ring and putting it down again as I remembered whose it was, and then unconsciously taking it up again, I told her in such terms as I could find how matters stood. She nodded from time to time. Again it was not my fault if she failed to understand. She did, I now know, fail, and failed the more hopelessly that she thought she did understand. Many, many thick wrappings lie between placid Aunt Angela and the stark realities of Life. "I see perfectly," she said, when I had made that statement that would have appalled any but herself. "It was exactly the same with George. (I was once--engaged--to a man called George.) George put a precisely similar case quite plainly before me. _He_ was consumptive, or rather his poor father was, and they do say it skips a generation--poor George!" I shook my head, but she only sighed with gentle content. She did not really miss George. "But," she went on, while my eyes wandered to the corner by the sideboard where Archie had had his conversation with Mr Shoto about the Yoshiwara, "I shouldn't have refused him for that. (I did refuse him, and I heard afterwards that for weeks he ate scarcely anything at all.) It was something quite different that came between us--I've never told even Evie what the real reason was." I interrupted her. "Are you sure, Miss Soames, that you've quite understood my real reason?" (More plainly I dared not speak, lest later there should be a chink in my own armour.)